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> Wow, that sounds very bad to me. It might, but today, I run into tons of developers that don't understand the fundamentals. I worked with a guy who I affect

by joeblau 12y ago

> Wow, that sounds very bad to me. It might, but today, I run into tons of developers that don't understand the fundamentals. I worked with a guy who I affectionally named "Stack Man." He basically used a stack for any list implementation. He didn't understand the difference between a list, a queue, and a stack. You're teaching your students Java and telling them "Just use Collections.sort" and that's fine, but do you understand when Collections.sort is bad? If you don't understand the underlying algorithm of how a merge sort works, you might be telling them to use something that is worse than could actually be worse than a bubble sort in certain cases. Also Java wasn't taught to CS students at our school, that was only for BIT (Business Information Technology). Teachers wanted you to understand memory and pointers.

cs02rm0 12y ago
<i> I worked with a guy who I affectionally named "Stack Man." He basically used a stack for any list implementation. He didn't understand the difference between a list, a queue, and a stack.</i> That's brilliant, although I'd imagine it could begin to annoy. Slightly obtuse, but I'd have had to get a snippet of this to play every time he checked in a new stack... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE0XcdM22Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE0XcdM22Yo
squeaky-clean 12y ago
>You're teaching your students Java and telling them "Just use Collections.sort" and that's fine, but do you understand when Collections.sort is bad? If you don't understand the underlying algorithm of how a merge sort works, you might be telling them to use something that is worse than could actually be worse than a bubble sort in certain cases. When your assignment has to be uploaded in 3 hours, and your dataset is 120 items, Collections.Sort is always better than writing your own sort. I never said I taught them only to use Collections.sort, as that would be just as bad as never teaching them the standard libraries and only teaching data-structures. You need a healthy balance of both fields of knowledge. Otherwise you end up spitting out either programmers who can use library functions without understanding what's actually going on, or programmers who know all about the underlying methods and logic, but can't write code efficiently and quickly enough to actually help a team. That's not to say you cannot write code efficiently or quickly. You likely did as most good programmers do and learned on your own time as well. But for students who don't do this, they will be lacking huge amounts of practical knowledge.

by joeblau 12y ago

cs02rm0 12y ago

<i> I worked with a guy who I affectionally named "Stack Man." He basically used a stack for any list implementation. He didn't understand the difference between a list, a queue, and a stack.</i> That's brilliant, although I'd imagine it could begin to annoy. Slightly obtuse, but I'd have had to get a snippet of this to play every time he checked in a new stack... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE0XcdM22Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE0XcdM22Yo

squeaky-clean 12y ago

>You're teaching your students Java and telling them "Just use Collections.sort" and that's fine, but do you understand when Collections.sort is bad? If you don't understand the underlying algorithm of how a merge sort works, you might be telling them to use something that is worse than could actually be worse than a bubble sort in certain cases. When your assignment has to be uploaded in 3 hours, and your dataset is 120 items, Collections.Sort is always better than writing your own sort. I never said I taught them only to use Collections.sort, as that would be just as bad as never teaching them the standard libraries and only teaching data-structures. You need a healthy balance of both fields of knowledge. Otherwise you end up spitting out either programmers who can use library functions without understanding what's actually going on, or programmers who know all about the underlying methods and logic, but can't write code efficiently and quickly enough to actually help a team. That's not to say you cannot write code efficiently or quickly. You likely did as most good programmers do and learned on your own time as well. But for students who don't do this, they will be lacking huge amounts of practical knowledge.